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DVD of the Week: “Saraband”

February 18, 2014

For Ingmar Bergman, master of torment, the past is a source of untreatable pain and a cause for undying regret. That’s why the potentially nostalgic setup of his last feature, “Saraband,” from 2003 (which I discuss in this clip)—a reunion of the protagonists (named Marianne and Johan) and actors (Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson) from his 1973 film “Scenes from a Marriage”—rapidly dispels its sentimentality as it plunges the characters into a vortex of recriminations and a new round of troubles. The elderly, long-divorced couple’s new big problems involve the second and third generations—Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), Johan’s son from a previous marriage, and Karin (Julia Dufvenius), Henrik’s daughter. They also involve the dead—Henrik’s late wife—and, as ever in Bergman, death itself, the spectre of which hangs heavily over the octogenarian Johan and seems to burn away the last vestiges of social graces and modest compassion, and unsheath his domineering power and his unslaked rage. In its naked terror and cold fury, in its profound isolation and unresolved conflicts, “Saraband” is a fitting end to Bergman’s directorial career, one of the great valedictory works.